presentation skills training

presentation skills training

Enhancing Presentation Skills

1. Introduction

The introduction gives an overview of the course, its rationale, its aims, and main topics. The course provides an insight into presentation skills, which is now considered an almost universal activity. Please remember that this course is not designed to make you into a great presenter, and it is certainly not about “tricks” to make you appear more confident than you are. At its root, it is about altering your behavior in a presentation situation. This is a complex thing to do because you will have attitudes and habits that are deeply ingrained. We will start by examining your existing behavior in a presentation situation and trying to analyze what is good and bad about it. We provide a safe environment to practice new behaviors and try to provide a rationale that will convince you to persist with them. Often it is difficult to change because you try something different and the response is “it didn’t work”. A key objective of this course is to enable you to persist because you have a clear idea of where you are trying to get to, and you can see improvement as you move in that direction.

2. Understanding the Importance of Effective Presentations

Would you invest two thousand dollars to attend a conference, where the highlight was someone reading verbatim from a poorly-prepared script? Probably not. Now, how many times have we all seen facilitators pack up their interactive presentation tools and toys, and leave just when the learners were beginning to feel engaged, challenged, and changed? And with a little reflection, how many times, under similar circumstances, have we done the same? Then begged off for lack of time, the need to reschedule. Let’s be honest. The opportunity to deliver our message, in a more permanent and persuasive way, was just not compelling enough to invigorate the change in delivery. As learning and development professionals, it is essential that our learners perceive us as the leading source for the subject matter we are delivering. If we have good ideas, we need to be able to exchange them with others. If we have services to sell, we need to be able to present benefits so that others will say ‘yes’. If we have a message that is pertinent to the health, safety and welfare of the general public, we must cut through the distractions that are inherent to modern society, to educate and persuade the masses. Step one in this process is to understand that being a key source and influence for social change is an art which combines simple and refined communication with a strategic delivery. This is where effective presentations come into play.

3. Key Elements of Powerful Presentations

Key factors of effective presentations include engaging the audience, establishing a purpose for the audience to listen, creating a consistent message, organizational structure, and the degree of audience understanding and retention. These factors are all interrelated and many involve the presenter knowing some key information about his/her audience. A presenter is better able to speak to the heart of an audience if he/she knows the general attitudes and beliefs of the audience. Understanding the audience will help the presenter in establishing a purpose for listening, modifying any previously held beliefs of the audience that are contrary to the presenter’s new message, and in creating a message with maximum relevance to the audience. Maximum audience understanding and retention is related to learning theory and will be explained later on in this document. Audience engagement is related to changing the audience’s attitude towards the presenter. A presenter is said to have been successful if the audience adopts a positive attitude towards the presenter – this however is a challenging task for presenters with a new message or a message that conflicts with audience beliefs.

Although there is no step-by-step ‘formula’ that guarantees a successful presentation, there are a number of key elements that are common to effective presentations. Many of these elements involve understanding the cognitive and emotional reactions of an audience to a speaker. Other elements involve the presenter understanding two additional factors about bringing the audience to a new understanding of. First, the presenter must understand how the human mind receives new information (learning theory) and the second, the presenter must understand the most effective way to change attitudes, values, and beliefs. A presentation is successful if it changes audience attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. Effective persuasion is thus a key element of successful presentations.

4. Developing Engaging Delivery Techniques

• Use limited notes Notes are useful to jog your memory, so you don’t miss important points. They should not be a full script of what you want to say, nor should they be cue cards. Writing your script out in full means you transfer the importance from the content of the presentation to the act of you reading it. The words you speak are not the presentation, they support the visuals and these should say it all. Your audience reads the slides and then looks to you for elaboration. If you are still trying to explain when the slide has changed, you have lost the audience. Jog your memory with key words, diagrams, or abbreviations noting what you want to be saying at that specific point. If you are having trouble remembering your presentation, then with each practice try noting more condensed points. Finally, to deliver the best presentation, saying the right things is essential. To do this well, you must understand the material. It is unlikely that you would give a friend directions about how to get somewhere if you keep getting lost along the way. You should know your material well enough that you could comfortably give the presentation without the aid of visual stimulus. This greatly helps in last-minute presentations which sometimes occur in the working world.

• Developing a conversational style Conversations are relaxed, two-way forms of communication. To engage your audience, make your presentation more like a conversation. You can present ideas as questions. Ask the audience’s opinion on something. Embed short stories or examples. Imagine they illustrate your idea to a friend. How would they do it? This is also a good way to pre-plan with intent to go into graphic communication (see tip 6). Focus on the content and not the presentation.

5. Overcoming Presentation Challenges

One of the major challenges of the presentation is overcoming stage fright. This is the anxiety over the prospect of giving a presentation in front of an audience. This may stem from a previous embarrassing experience, or it could be a personality trait. It is generally measured by its intensity and its interference with the act of public speaking. Although this can be a major obstacle to overcome, the good news is that it usually only hinders the initial few minutes during a presentation. This being a common fear, an audience’s “A” level attention often raises the comfort of the presenter as explained by Sarnoff and Zimbardo. This is because the presenter is not the center of attention when speaking to an audience that is not paying attention. So, in order to minimize the fear of public speaking, try to get the audience’s attention. This may put the presenter at ease because he knows the audience is focused on him and it will also help prepare for another common obstacle: inappropriate allocation of audience attention.

Planning a presentation is only half the battle. The key to a successful presentation is conquering challenges, which may occur before, during, or after the delivery. Some presenters struggle with stage fright, while others will have a difficult time choosing appropriate visual aids. Trying to get a read on the audience while speaking can also present a formidable challenge. Surveys show that up to 40% of people rate fear of public speaking as their number one fear, over death and disease. The following is a list of common presentation obstacles and suggestions for how to handle them.